As a result of globalization, traveling and mobilization has become a very common part of business. Employees in a companies' workforce must frequently move from location to location for business. At the same time, employees typically require reliable and quick access to their network data to complete their tasks and business objectives. Large, global organizations typically have data centers and network access points at multiple locations around the globe. Users on the road can generally choose to connect to the organization's network through access points geographically close to them. However, the location of the user's data will not change: the user's data will still be hosted at the user's home site. Unfortunately, remote data access can add significant delay a latency, which can lead to lost productivity.
Sometimes, users may connect to remote compute resources that are close to the users' data (e.g., local UNIX hosts or Remote Desktop clients). However, this approach requires long round-trips, which will also result in significant delay. Further, accessing data on far remote servers also requires an extra share of network capacity, and may have additional security risks. Accordingly, current solutions for remote data access have significant performance, security, and cost limitations.